1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to storage devices used within a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a network handles packets of different sizes, undesirable traffic patterns may arise and network performance may consequentially degrade. Accordingly, the aggregate performance of a network is typically improved when the size of a network packet is fixed. Ideally, a relatively small fixed packet size is selected in order to allow further performance enhancements such as fine-grained load-balancing and the multiplexing of network traffic. Implementing a smaller fixed packet size may also limit the worst-case performance a network packet must sustain.
Unfortunately, the performance of certain networked components may benefit from larger sized network packets. For example, disk drive performance is typically better when accesses span large ranges of data. If disk drives are coupled to a host by a network, use of a small network packet size may limit the performance of the disk drives by subdividing the data for each disk I/O operation into multiple network packets. When successive packets specify sequential disk locations, the amount of time needed for the disk controller to process each packet may exceed the amount of time taken to for the next disk location to rotate past the disk's read or write head. Since performance of the command specified in the packet will be delayed until the disk location is again positioned where it can be accessed by the read or write head, handling of such packets may undesirably affect disk performance.